Attention all #ISA2015 participants, the ‪#‎RubySeries‬ needs YOU! We are looking for volunteers to film/record #Ruby panels. We will have one or two video cameras and, thus far, two or three podcast quality microphones (to use mikes, we will also need laptops, so volunteers for podcasting – bring them along). Volunteers – would be great if you are in town already on Tuesday for quick training. Ruby panels’ organizers – if you have podcast quality microphones, please bring them along and record your own panels if possible (Blue Snowball microphone is 59$ on Amazon). All – if you have microphones and or even video cameras with tripods that you could use at ISA, please bring them along. And do remember to ask all panelists for consent if recording. Please see discussion on the Occupy IR FB group for further discussion. Solidarity!

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Following Cynthia Weber’s recent post over at Duck of Minerva, there has been a lot of debate about the International Studies Association’s planned ‘Saphire Series’ for the upcoming annual conference in New Orleans. Some of that debate has been taking place at the #occupyirtheory/ipe Facebook group. With now over 175 comments, there have been a wide ranging set of proposals and ideas about the issues raised by the Series, and how to respond to them. Many will be using the #Ruby hashtag on Twitter to maintain communications on these issues as the conference proceeds. Another idea has been for people to list any panels they feel might offer the possibility of institutionally balancing the dominant ‘white, male and tenured’ voices the Series is showcasing. Interested readers can also follow the Twitter hashtag #RubySeries for updates on these panels.

Disclaimer: this list is based on suggestions made in context of an open and ongoing discussion at the OccupyIR group on Facebook, among other places, about ISA’s Sapphire Series. It is not intended as a way of ‘promoting’ select panels. It is merely a way for people to link their panels together in an expression of solidarity in response to the perceived elitism of the Sapphire series. If you are part of a panel that you do want listed, let me know. Similarly, if you do not want your panel listed, I am happy to remove it for you.

Abstract: What are the ways that relations of global capitalism can be made intelligible through analyses of various “crises”? This panel seeks to develop the analysis of contemporary capital by way of capturing its expressions, or effects, in a range of contemporary global crises (economic, environmental, epidemic, colonial, militaristic, etc.). We hope to highlight different iterations of global capitalism through its intrinsic tendency to crisis, and by doing so, to underscore the possibilities of a variety approaches to the critique of capitalism. Thus, we invite papers addressing a breadth of potential sites and scenes of contemporary capitalism’s globality, from those involving more immediately situated struggles over the limits it places on everyday material existence to more widely-scaled analyses, focusing on the governmental and governmentalizing dynamics of globalization itself. Gathering these various approaches together, this panel will be an opportunity to explore the stakes of global capitalist discourse and practice as it advances norms of market-based existence, individual responsibility, flexible partnership and resilience, all the while beset by the aporias of uneven development, financialization, war profiteering, corporate welfare, and the reckless extraction and consumption of resources.

For more info, contact Nicholas Kiersey (at the address on this website) or Garnet Kindervater. Submissions no later than Monday, September 29, please.

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Joe Lowndes, who’s an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon, is organizing a statement on the Steven Salaita affair. The statement reads as follows:

Dear Chancellor Wise: we the undersigned will not visit the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus until Professor Salaita is reinstated to the position offered him by the faculty and which he had accepted in good faith.

If you are a political scientist, and you wish to sign the statement, please email Joe at jelowndes@gmail.com.

John Protevi, a professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University, is organizing an identical statement for philosophers. If you are a philosopher and you wish to sign the statement, email John at protevi@lsu.edu.

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Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 288 pp.

(Note: This is an extended, remixed version of a book review I’ve written for a forthcoming issue of New Political Science).

In the context of the current financial crisis, it is fair to expect that any book taking as its title Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea should satisfy at least two criteria. On the one hand, the book should present a robust exposition of the basic genealogy of the concept. On the other, the book should try to offer an argument as to how this idea achieved such a preeminent position in guiding not only the decisions of key policymakers but also the everyday, commonsensical worldview of the very populations for whomthese decisions will have the most serious consequences. It is in terms of the former that Blyth’s book is strong.

The wonderful people over at Disorder of Things have posted an extended version of my recent review of Dave Eden’s excellent ‘Autonomy: Capitalism, Class and Politics.’ The original version, which appears in the current issue of New Political Science, is focused more on the book itself. This version tries to offer a more developed response to Eden’s thoughts on the place of the critique of the commodity in contemporary Marxism. Sincere thanks to Wanda and Pablo for hosting the piece. ~ Nick

Foucault often spoke of critique in vague terms. A truth that “functions as a weapon,” on the one hand, but which can “light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it,” on the other. Statements like these appear to us as riddles. But what is critique for Foucault, really? One fascinating answer to this question can be found in his short piece, “What is Enlightenment?”

Now, I confess, when I was in graduate school I used to think this was one of the toughest bits of Foucault reading out there. I suppose I still do. Where I really struggle is later in the piece, when he gets into the opposition between two ideal types, the man of the modern world and the flâneur. Here, he paraphrases Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur as one who adopts “the spectator’s posture.” It seems to me that the flâneur is kind of a drop out, or somehow self-involved – a cynical figure who refuses to engage with the world around him. Either way, against this passive figure (which Foucault does not praise), the modern man has an active stance in the world. His being in the world somehow changes it, but not fundamentally. Foucault observes that the modern man’s attitude towards the world, and himself, involves both ambition and acceptance of certain limits to that ambition. That is, it “does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom.” In this sense, modern man is he who strives to take what is natural in the world, including his own self, and make it somehow more than it was. And the emblematic figure of the modern subject here is the dandy, the ultimate entrepreneur of himself, who is compelled constantly to “invent himself” in relation to those limits. Perfect, or at least moving towards some sort of optimal state.

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From Wanda Vrasti, does the language of precarity empower us? Or can we do better?

But what if precarity was the wrong rallying point to focus on? What if instead of describing a shared experience all that the concept did was point to the absence of a common ground? Is there any way we could turn precarity around from a testament to our shared vulnerability into a positive affirmation of collective desire?

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Welcome to #OCCUPYIRTHEORY, home of the "Fully Automated" podcast. This page is hosted by Nicholas Kiersey, Professor of Political Science at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is currently working on a book about the cultural political economy of the Irish financial crisis.

Horizontal Politics & IR Theory

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A blog focusing primarily on the significance of Occupy Wall Street and other horizontalist political movements for the academic disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy. Also home to the ‘Fully Automated’ podcast, featuring interviews with scholars and thinkers on a range of ongoing controversies within the left, including austerity, financialization, automation and, above all, the future of left strategy. The blog is open to the IR and IPE communities. Guest-posts are always welcome.